Beyond Men and Machines

In The Coldest Crucible, Michael Robinson has authored a terse, elegantly written volume chronicling sixty years of American history in 206 pages. By contrast, Günther Sollinger’s massively detailed S. A. Andrée: The Beginning of Polar Aviation uses 720 pages to cover two years of Swedish history.{1} To say that each book accomplishes its intended task is not to render judgment about the relative complexity of Swedish and American polar history but rather to acknowledge the different intentions of the authors.

Robinson uses the public perception of American Arctic explorations to illuminate developments in the political and cultural history of the United States between 1850 and 1909, beginning with Elisha Kent Kane’s celebrated journey to the high Arctic and Greenland and ending with the disputed priority claim of Frederick Cook and Robert Peary to the North Pole. Sollinger, on the other hand, focuses on a single Arctic explorer, Salomon August Andrée, who abandoned the balloon in which he set out for the North Pole after only three days of flight in 1897. (The bodies of the three crewmembers were not found until 1930.) Sollinger’s book, which actually is broader in scope than its title suggests, covering the history of air travel in the Arctic throughout the nineteenth century, aims to assess the feasibility of Andrée’s mission, to find out if the expedition had a “reasonable chance of success,” and to ask whether its “premises were realistic” (p. xiv). Sollinger answers the last question in the negative, and central to that conclusion is the technology of Andrée’s vessel, the Eagle, whose fitness for the Arctic environment he evaluates in exacting detail.

Robinson’s interest in the Arctic is quite different from Sollinger’s. He considers the Arctic “a faraway stage on which explorers played out dramas that were unfolding very close to home” (p. 3). Political and cultural demarcatons from the Mexican-American War to the Gilded Age and these political and cultural demarcations are central to his argument, as he uses them to explain the changes in the American public’s interest in, and expectations of, several polar explorers. Kane, for example, was heralded as a hero upon his return in 1855, despite his lack of scientific results, because he provided a vehicle for the unambiguous expression of unified patriotism to a country otherwise divided into slave and free states. The homecoming reception of Isaac Hayes six years later was distinctly cooler, because the country was then consumed by the Civil War and no longer had any interest in the “war against nature” (p. 63).

The Coldest Crucible is neatly argued—perhaps a little too neatly in places. The reenactment of American politics on the Arctic stage was probably a bit less direct than Robinson portrays it. He cites the unresolved issue of slavery and a desire to find a unifying national cause in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War as factors in congressional support of Henry Grinnell’s search for Sir John Franklin, while Charles Hall’s 1871 expedition to the North Pole was ridiculed by a member of the scientific advisory board as a mere “vain-glorious attempt to flaunt the Stars and Stripes” (p. 79). Why would Americans not have been as eager to be distracted from political realities by heroic tales of adventure after the Civil War as before? With the exploits of William Wellman and Peary and Cook at the turn of the century, American interest in the Arctic peaked again, which Robinson attributes to anxieties about masculinity in an urbanizing nation confronting the end of the frontier. Yet, as Sollinger shows, this period was a high point of Arctic exploration for many nations, witnessing the journeys of the Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen and the Swede Andrée as well as British, German, and Italian polar adventurers. International competition spurred attempts to successive “Farthest Norths,” and the United States was an active contender in this race. Robinson tends to overlook the international history of polar exploration, focusing instead on a series of uniquely American causes and conditions driving it or hindering it. Nevertheless, this tight focus does keep the reader’s attention and advances Robinson’s main thesis successfully: the Arctic was deployed in various American political and cultural narratives to serve different ends and became the setting for the enactment of larger dramas.

Sollinger, in contrast, does not neglect the international dimension of his story. He points out, for example, that Andrée’s balloon was manufactured in France, as were most manned balloons at that time, and gives a detailed account of the reception of Andrée’s plans and the reports of his death in Britain, France, and Germany as well as in Scandinavia. Indeed, the book is not short of detail in any way; if any Technology and Culture readers are interested in building a navigable balloon, reading this volume might provide them all the information they need. More generally engaging for historians of technology is Sollinger’s argument that Andrée’s attempt to reach the North Pole constituted a break with the so-called Swedish school of polar exploration, which valued careful science over “spectacular undertakings” and “dashes to the Pole” (p. 19). Andrée did enjoy wide, if not universal, support in Sweden, as he proposed an interesting new technical solution to the problems that had been encountered in using ships and sleds. Today it may seem self-evident that Andrée’s attempt to pilot a balloon to the North Pole was unrealistic. In the 1890s, however, explorers had encountered such significant barriers that, in Urban Wråkberg’s words, a “logistical crisis” in polar exploration had arisen: “all techniques of travel conceivable . . . had been tested without any major breakthrough.”{2}

Despite their differences, each of these books rests solidly within an established historiography of polar exploration. Both Robinson and Sollinger revisit old questions and fill in gaps in the history, rather than seeking new perspectives. The reassessment of expeditions to determine what mistakes were made and whether the dead men were foolish or simply unlucky is a longstanding tradition among historians.{3} Sollinger wisely avoids the discussions of character issues typical of this literature, but essentially he is revising revisionists such as Wråkberg, who tried to rehabilitate Andrée, by showing that the expedition was badly planned after all. Robinson’s approach is a bit more innovative, as he is interested in explaining the culture that gave rise to polar expeditions, not describing the expeditions themselves. In a sense, The Coldest Crucible can be seen as an American version of the story told by Francis Spufford in I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination, although Robinson is more historical and less literary than Spufford.{4}

Ultimately, however, Robinson’s account comes to resemble the historical material it analyzes. The American explorers, he notes, presented themselves as “men of science and cultivation,” like Kane, or “men of the frontier,” like Peary. Because the American public was fascinated by their character, Robinson concentrates on the explorers’ personal and professional biographies, and on the ways in which these influenced the public’s perception of the men themselves.{5} As he acknowledges in his introduction, though, there was more to American “Arctic fever” than hero worship. An eager market for landscape paintings of icebergs and Romantic poetry about the ice developed, as well as curiosity about the native peoples of the North, all of which must have played some role in the rising and falling tides of public interest that Robinson chronicles. Such factors, along with John Franklin’s public persona, are major elements of Spufford’s narrative, less sharply argued though that is, and it would have been intriguing to see how they played out on the other side of the Atlantic.

Sollinger and Robinson have written well-researched and important books. Still, it is plain to see in both of them that the field of polar history is relatively young, and much remains to be done. This is not to say that there are men who went to the Arctic and Antarctic whose stories have not been told; biographies of explorers and expeditions have been all but exhausted as a vehicle of analysis. Perhaps the opportunity for historical reflection and scholarship presented by the International Polar Year in 2007–08 will eventually lead toward a broader history of the poles, using perspectives from cultural, environmental, or gender history.{6} More work along these lines would bring the history of polar exploration into closer dialogue with the better-developed literature on the history of exploration in general. This in turn might go some distance toward dispelling the image of the poles as places apart and help us to view them instead as regions intimately connected to our own history and concerns—as, indeed, research on global warming increasingly and alarmingly shows that they are.

{1} Michael F. Robinson, The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006, pp. xii+206, $39); Günther Sollinger, S. A. Andrée: The Beginning of Polar Aviation, 1895–1897 (Moscow: Russian Academy of Sciences, 2005, pp. xv+720).

{2} Urban Wråkberg, “Andrée Folly: Time for a Reappraisal?” in The Centennial of S. A. Andrée’s North Pole Expedition (Stockholm, 1999), 59–60.

{3} The British explorer Robert Falcon Scott and his tragic British Antarctic Expedition of 1910–12 have probably been the major victims of this kind of analysis: see Roland Huntford, The Last Place on Earth (New York, 1985); Diana Preston, A First-Rate Tragedy: Captain Scott’s Antarctic Expeditions (London, 1997); and Susan Solomon, The Coldest March: Scott’s Fatal Antarctic Expedition (New Haven, Conn., 2001).

{4} Francis Spufford, I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (New York, 1997).

{5} Rather remarkably for histories of exploration, there are almost no maps in either of these books; there are only three among close to one hundred illustrations in Sollinger’s book, while Robinson has chosen to illustrate his book almost entirely with portraits of the explorers.

{6} Such perspectives have not been entirely lacking. See, for example, Sherrill R. Grace, Canada and the Idea of the North (Montreal, 2001); John Cannon, Red Arctic: Polar Exploration and the Myth of the North in the Soviet Union, 1932–1939 (Oxford, 1998); Kieran Mulvaney, At the Ends of the Earth: A History of the Polar Regions (Washington, D.C., 2001); and Lisa Bloom, Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Exploration (Minneapolis, 1993). Robinson presents an insightful critique of Bloom’s book on page 177.